Relentlessly and unreasonably prattling on without any objectivity for one candidate and against another with all the self control of a Meth head tweaking away the night disassembling their stereo, or an old AM radio, is bound to catch up to a pundit. Today is that day for the Right’s beloved Jennifer Rubin.

Referring to this December report on the least desirable endorsements (“According to a Marist poll, 79 percent of New Hampshire voters say getting Trump’s support would make them less likely or no more likely to vote for him or her”), Jesse Benton, spokesman for Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), e-mails me, “Poor Newt. Based on the polling I’ve seen, he stands to lose 5 points from this circus act.” As for Trump, Benton cracks, “I didn’t think it was possible for Trump to lower his credibility, but somehow, he just did.”

Perhaps it was the Donald’s appreciation for Mitt Romney’s unproductive style of governance in Massachusetts that caused him to settle on Mitt, or maybe he simply longs to sing a duet of America the Beautiful with him – we may never know. But rest assured, give it a day, or two and the light, life and inspiration of conservativism, our dear Jenn Rubin of the Washington Post will somehow manage to convince herself that joining them for a little three part harmony would just be the bomb. Let’s wait and see.

… all of these pro-Newt characters share a penchant for extreme, nasty rhetoric with a disdain for productive governance. This is all about THEM and their PR machines.

Really, what’s next for Newt — a Duke Cunningham endorsement from a jail cell?

(more…)

- Donald Trump to self: You’re fired.

- Chris Moody says that Trump sent him a critique of his piece, linked above:

If this is really his, and Moody has a great poker face, Donald Trump really puts a circle as the dot for his exclamation points? Call him a trainwreck all you want to, but I love that he did this (if he did. I want to so badly believe).

- Ace of Spades chews up the author of “My Tim Tebow Problem“:

… while this guy is coming from the Jewish perspective, he is more crucially coming from a liberal perspective, and he’s been taught, as many liberals have been, that Hatred is a powerful and useful weapon, and can be righteously wielded against the Unworthy.

[...]

… the idea of a new age of pogrom based upon the Tim Tebow throwing a football seems to be a reactionary one, conceived in hatred, executed in bitterness.

- MSNBC is looking to add more progressives to their echo chamber.

- Whoa: Russian blogger harnessing opposition to Putin is emerging as the opposition leader. Ew: He has a dark side. How dark? Think Russian nationalism and neo-Nazism.

(more…)

There have been a great number of debates this primary season. Some have been more interesting than others. Some have been soporific and a few have had some exciting moments. While there may be those who take issue with how some of these debates have been formatted, none of them have been truly ridiculous. That is, until now.

On December 27^th the ION Television network (formerly PAX) will be hosting a debate. It’s being billed as the last major debate before the Iowa Caucuses. The ION network claims to reach 99 Million viewers. I’m not sure how many will actually tune in when they realize what is involved.

The debate is being sponsored by everyone’s favorite birther Donald “The Donald” Trump, and Newsmax, considered to be one of the premiere Republican-leaning/conservative media outlets. The fact that Trump is involved should be a warning sign that things are not going to be as … well, straight as some of the other debates. That’s when things go absolutely wacky, for lack of a better turn of phrase.

As with all the other debates to date, it has been deemed necessary to have the Main Stream Media involved, even in this, which seems to be a prime opportunity for unleashing the power of the alternative media. This might have been okay if the organizers had gone for some personalities who have some credit in more conservative circles, perhaps Jake Tapper or Andrew Malcolm.

As mentioned, the folks in charge went in a completely different direction. The head of the debate staff is one Eason Jordan. Now, that name might be somewhat familiar to some readers. He has received 4 Emmys, 2 Peabodys and is the first living person to receive the Livingstone Award’s “Special Citation For Outstanding Achievement.”

He also admitted to covering up Saddam Hussein’s atrocities in Iraq for the privilege of access to the regime.

(more…)

- The other day the New Wonkette was salivating over hidden meanings in Gingrich’s office gewgaws; now the NYT is poring over Gingrich’s 1971 dissertation. Yes, really.

Mr. Gingrich would be our first president with a Ph.D. since Woodrow Wilson. Does his work as a historian tell us anything about him? Or, for that matter, anything about why, despite certain events in 1776, he considers “anticolonial” an epithet? To address these questions, a good place to start is his 1971 Tulane doctoral dissertation: “Belgian Education Policy in the Congo 1945-1960.”

For Pete’s sake. This is the stupidest thing the NYT has written today. Can you imagine if the NYT pored over Obama’s college thesis, or hey, even his college records, which have never been release despite repeated requests? Can you imagine the NYT going over Fast and Furious emails they way they’re rifling through Gingrich’s thesis — or devoured Sarah Palin’s emails?

- Al Jazeera opens a new bureau in Chicago.

Previously on Al Jazeera:

Why It’s Time for Rep. Peter King to Investigate Al-Jazeera
Another Al-Jazeera Journalist Suspected of Terror Ties
U.S. Officials Suspected Al-Jazeera Ties to Al-Qaeda
How Al-Jazeera Kills Americans

- Mitt’s media blowback:

Mitt Romney’s vulnerabilities as a candidate are well known, yet a seemingly new one surfaced last week: his unusual brittleness in the face of media questions.

With one prickly interview with Fox’s Bret Baier on Tuesday — in which the candidate appeared uncomfortable and even angry fielding basic questions about his record — the former Massachusetts governor set off a round of speculation about his ability to operate outside hermetically sealed campaign events, reminding his rivals and the media of the extreme lengths to which he has gone to evade the national press.

On a Fox panel that night, Juan Williams called the interview “disastrous,” Jonah Goldberg said Romney appeared “uncomfortable” and Baier said people thought Romney seemed “irritated and tense” — sentiments that were echoed across the other networks that night and in print the next morning.

For a candidate who has been in the national spotlight as long as Romney, his discomfort with Baier was telling. And it reflected a deliberate and long-standing strategy of dodging tough questions and questioners.

- Fox moving to the center?

To anyone paying attention, the so-called Birther, or birth certificate controversy, surrounding those misguided rumors that questioned whether or not President Obama had been born in this country, was a controversy both Obama and his MSM allies loved and maliciously stoked to keep alive. For them, it was a beautiful issue that gave them a racial brush with which to tar all Republicans and, better still, it worked as the perfect distraction to keep conservatives off message and on defense. For example, NBC’s David Gregory demands Congressman Eric Cantor take a firm stand against Birthers, and when he isn’t harsh enough to please a leftist like Gregory, that becomes the only story that comes out of a full-length “Meet the Press” interview.

All part of the plan.

And for a number of years it worked, at least until Donald Trump finally slew the Birther Dragon by turning the issue into such a negative for Obama, he was forced to finally act. After the President produced the very same birth certificate the MSM had assured us he could never get, the scalded media then attempted to spin it into a win for Obama, when in reality both they and the White House had just lost a powerful weapon both were counting on to reelect Obama. Without the shiny toy of Birtherism, conservatives might actually be allowed to get their 2012 message out and the country might actually have a discussion about Obama’s dismal record.

Today, Obama’s Media’s Palace Guards are desperately searching for new methods of distraction. So desperate are they that Politico’s Ben Smith and Slate’s Dave Weigel (both former members of the infamous Journolist) now have a regular cottage industry in coming up with anti-GOP nonsense distractions (today’s journolisting provides two perfect examples). But as diligent as those two are (What Fast and Furious?), they obviously aren’t enough.

Which helps to explain this insipid nonsense:

Many Republicans, however, don’t regard government jobs as actual jobs, and are eager to see them disappear. Republican governors around the Midwest have aggressively tried to break the power of public unions while slashing their work forces, and Congressional Republicans have proposed paying for a payroll tax cut by reducing federal employment rolls by 10 percent through attrition. That’s 200,000 jobs, many of which would be filled by blacks and Hispanics and others who tend to vote Democratic, and thus are considered politically superfluous.

Believe it or not, that’s a Sunday New York Times’ editorial attempting to make the case that wanting smaller government is, yep, racist.

Does the New York Times really believe that?

Of course not. The Times’ editorial is an obvious political tactic, not a serious policy position. The Times is intentionally toying with us, hoping to make us angry and put us on defense. ’Racist’ is the new ‘Birther.’

(more…)

- Lee Enterprises goes belly up.

- Fox says it was left off of Facebook’s Most Shared Stories for 2011.

In May, FoxNews.com wrote about a quirky page on the Centers for Disease Control’s website that advises viewers how to deal with a potential zombie apocalypse (strange but true). That story received 38,649 Facebook shares — well within the boundaries of the two New York Times stories, but not included in the list.

Other stories from FoxNews should have made the list as well, such as a September story about the White House condemning the death sentence of an Iranian pastor. It received 26,208 shares.

- But what happens if reporter Chelsea Clinton goes into politics? Newsbusters has more.

- “Tebow’s prayers are … flagrant end zone dance.”

Tebow is free to give “mad respect” to his lord, but I’d rather he do it on his own time. A number of players cross themselves on every play, but they do it discreetly — and expeditiously. Tebow’s prayer timeouts, by contrast, are as gratuitously in-your-face as the most flagrant end zone dance. And they last as long. Yet, according to his supporters, all of footballdom is supposed to give him a pass because his purpose is holy. Isn’t that what churches are for?

Christians aren’t supposed to hide their religion and in an era where one of the most recognized images in football is Janet Jackson’s nip slip. It’s refreshing to see someone out and loud about their faith. You can always change the channel.

- Eason Jordan, he’s baaaack!

(more…)

At the end of April, Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher decided Ed Schultz looked like a genius for outing Donald Trump as a racist, partly on the grounds that Trump had the audacity to reference basketball as one of the President’s pleasures (the piece was recently relabeled a “column”).  The President constantly makes an ostentatious show of his love for basketball – whether he is filling out tournament brackets, staging photo-ops with the UNC basketball team, joining sportscasters to give basketball commentary at Duke games, publicizing his own basketball games at the White House, promoting his former Duke Basketball playing “body man” and on and on.

But Tommy Christopher of course found it viciously racist for Donald Trump to associate President Obama with basketball regardless of how desperately the President tries to associate himself with basketball.  Surely it is just another attempt by Trump to “other-ize” the President by associating him with some exotic sport that is extremely foreign to the white people of America (like John Thune and Scott Brown perhaps?).

But there are race mongers, and then there is Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher.

(more…)

The objective of Media Matters For America (MMFA) is to tell half-truths, spin, distort and well … let’s face it, they will do anything except deal with the facts in order to try and discredit anyone who disagrees with the Progressive agenda as outlined by their favorite rich guy, George Soros, the “Dude” of “Spooky.” But you have to hand it to them, sometimes they are so creative in their methods.

Take their homepage from the other day:

Looking at the screen shot, one would think that they would present proof that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Andrew Breitbart are being disingenuous about their “birther” positions. But when you open up to the items inside it becomes reminiscent of that old song from Sesame Street,

One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn’t belong,
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?

In the article teased by the cover story Hannity is mentioned 18x, Limbaugh is mentioned 20x and Andrew Breitbart is mentioned….wait let me count…ah zero times. Breitbart is showcased in the picture, right there over headline, but he isn’t part of the story about flip-flopping about the “birther” issue.

Giving MMFA the benefit of the doubt (something they don’t practice) I considered the possibility that the author of the article forgot to put in the Breitbart quotes, leading me to check Breitbart’s websites for “birther” content.

(more…)

Rabid leftist and Mediate goofball Tommy Christopher certainly isn’t above race baiting, but unlike some halfhearted MSM “racers,” he isn’t content with merely maligning someone as a racist through innuendo.  No, he’s going to make up some facts as well.  Way to put your back into, Tommy.  Whatever helps you manufacture a racial incident for political gain.

First Christopher asserted that Trump’s reference to Obama’s penchant for playing highly public basketball games was actually coded racism (in Tommy Christopher’s world, only one race of people play basketball, and nobody is allowed to note what Obama does with his spare time if it also fits into Christopher’s stereotypes).  Trump sure “blew hard on the [racist] dogwhistle [sic].” Here’s what Trump said:

“… you look at what’s happening with gasoline prices, where – he said he has no control over prices, which he does if he gets on the phone or gets off his basketball court, or whatever he’s doing at the time, I mean he should be focused on OPEC and getting those prices down.”

If Christopher merely settled for that kind of baseless, contrived inference, he would only barely be keeping up with the MSM pack.

(more…)

Smitten by her blonde curls and still blissfully unaware of how cruel the world could be, at the age of eleven I called my first crush on the phone fully confident it would end with the beginning of a lifelong romance. Yes, I had watched many a friend go down in a flaming ball of fail in similar situations, watched them die slow deaths brought on by awkward pauses and fits of panic blanking the mind. But that wasn’t going to happen to me. I had learned from their trauma. There was no way anything could go wrong because I … had written a script that laid out every possible conversational scenario…

If you’re wondering how my pathetic little phone call went, watch Laura Flanders’ sorry attempt (video here) to confront Andrew Breitbart. Methinks that the moment Flanders learned she would be on national television seated next to Breitbart, visions of liberal glory popped off in her fevered mind as she plotted to publicly demand he apologize to Shirley Sherrod.

Train meet wreck. Ooh, that left a mark. But the truth usually does.

I was in the audience last night (pretty sure that’s Alex Marlow and I clapping all by our lonesome at the 11:05 mark), and while the crowd (who took our solo applause in stride) was obviously on Flanders’ side politically, her humorlessness eventually cost her their sympathy. Throughout the night, she tossed out one wet blanket after another with her joyless left-wing talking points that violated the spirit of the conservation. Eventually, in the “Overtime” segment, Breitbart turned to her and said:

(more…)

There are many groups of political crazies out there: you have the truthers–those who believe that George W. Bush was behind the 9/11 attacks (like former Green Jobs Czar Van Jones). Then there are the birthers–a group on whom I have written plenty about over the past few weeks.  They are the people who believe that they can have the POTUS removed from office because of a belief that he was born in another country.  Former Hilary Clinton operative Philip Berg was the king of the birthers until Donald Trump came along.

But the most destructive of political conspiracy theorists are the sick minds that believe that every comment made by a conservative or Republican against President Obama is intended to demean people of color. I call them “Racerists.” What make the Racerists more dangerous than the typical conspiracy moonbat is they build upon the existing stereotyping suggested in liberal-made campaign slogans with one simple purpose: to end discussion by intimidating people not to criticize the President.

With Donald Trump’s enhanced attention on the President’s birth certificate, the Racerists have come out again to spew their nonsense.

There are Kool-Aid drinkers and then there is Ed Schultz. Even in the liberal bastion of MSNBC, the depth of his Obama worship stands out. He also doesn’t have a very solid grasp of irony.

With Donald Trump’s first attack on Obama’s legitimacy finally coming to naught, Mr. Schultz feels the need to double down. He had some comments to make about the President and The Donald. Clearly Schultz has decided random statements are an effective substitute for coherent arguments.

We’ll go through these statements one by one.

(more…)

In the end, it took Donald Trump, billionaire CEO of Trump International and star of NBC’s “Celebrity Apprentice,” to get President Obama to release his original Certificate of Live Birth.  But, of course, the story does not end there.

At a press conference on Wednesday, the President lashed out at his friends in the mainstream media:

“I’m speaking to the vast majority of the American people, as well as to the press,” Obama said. “We do not have time for this kind of silliness. We’ve got better stuff to do.  I’ve got better stuff to do.”

But the question is:  why did the President seemingly “cave in” to Trump, a potential 2012 Republican presidential candidate, and why was he so “weird” about releasing this document in the first place – three years after the media-generated “birther” controversy began?

(more…)

Earlier I interviewed Donald Trump on my show and asked him about the President’s remarks this afternoon on the deficit, the birther issue, his past donations to Democrats such as Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, and Anthony Weiner, and his comments about running as an independent should he lose the GOP nomination.

This weekend, President Obama’s senior advisor David Plouffe stepped into the Donald Trump MSM-birther fray, dissing – what he termed – Trump’s “sideshow” public appearances.

“There may be a small part of the country that believes these things, but mainstream Americans think it’s (Trump’s birther remarks) a sideshow,” said Plouffe.

“Birther,” is, of course, the media’s pejorative term for those that believe the President is not a natural born U.S. citizen. Back in June 2008, after months of speculation, then candidate Barack Obama succumbed to the political pressure and released a “Certification of Live Birth” from the State of Hawaii. Unfortunately for Team Obama, a certification is not the original record of live birth, the document has only continued to fuel the controversy.

Enter Donald Trump.

(more…)

The activist old media have a dilemma here, what to do with one of their most powerful and favorite persons who lives in their favorite city on the planet? The Donald is causing them trouble and you can see their discomfort.

Let me say, the best interviews are the ones where you are surprised by the answers. Where the person you’re talking to shocks you with something you were not planning on. Good reporters know what 90% of the answers are going to be before they even ask the questions, so it’s something special when you get that number turned upside down.

Meredith Vieira, instead of embracing this unique moment, she was shocked, dismayed and disturbed that Donald Trump was saying the things he said about The Brilliant One.

Forget for a moment some of the specific things Trump said to Vieira the other day on “The Today Show,” but just watch her defensive reactions. Every time Trump blasted her Dear Leader she took it very personal. She had to fire back in defense as if Trump were going after one of her family members.

Trump actually said he supports the tea party!  Meredith must’ve thought she has been thrown into a “Saturday Night Live” skit, or April Fools was happening twice this year.

(more…)